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Mixamo’s Auto-Rigger

Our friends at Mixamo have been working on new solutions for game developers. You can already use their animation tools inside the Unity Asset Store, but their latest and greatest innovation is the Mixamo auto-rigger, which totally is the bees knees for artists delivering assets to Unity! This cutting-edge solution will change the way you rig and animate forever! Simply upload your character, identify a few points of anatomy on the character, and let the auto-rigger analyze the character and figure out the rest! Once you’ve got your character rigged, bring it right back into Unity where you can animate it using the Mixamo Animation Store, with which you can customize, preview and purchase custom procedural animation right inside the Unity development environment! In tandem with Unity and the Mixamo Animation Store, this represents a refreshing alternative to the often prohibitively expensive and time-consuming process of manually rigging and animating custom characters.

They’ve also done an awesome job continuing their support of their services for Unity users by releasing several new tutorials that will help you get started. The latest videos will help the Blender, modo and zBrush crowds. Now go animate something/someone!

See here for the Pinocchio auto-rigger paper and dos application.http://www.mit.edu/~ibaran/autorig/
It’s possible these guys are using that paper as their basis as they work identically, so if you’ve got some dos skills this does the same job. I’m incredibly surprised there isn’t loads of plugins using the Pinocchio algorithm as basic rigging should be in ever modeler to save 90% of the pointless work.

Wow! I tried out several characters, and I definitely didn’t expect the Auto-Rigger to handle such different body proportions, clothing, etc., … but it does a stellar job!! It’s also great to be able to apply many different animations to the rig immediately. Very impressive, Mixamo.

I recently rigged a few of my toony characters using Mixamo and the service works great. The price is amazingly cheap considering you get a rigged character in seconds, and the quality of the rig is very surprising. I will be uploading and rigging a few more characters in the near future.

This thing is pretty impressive actually. I can spend hours setting up a skeleton and weighting it. This thing does all the boring work in just a few minutes. Then I can spend my valuable time perfecting it if I want. Sweet!

I was preally skeptical of any technology that claimed to take over the entire process of creating joints and weighting a character but this autorigger BLEW ME AWAY! You really can upload all sorts of character proportions and it will rig/weight everything – including fingers within seconds! I like the fact that you can instantly preview all kinds of animations on your character too! AMAZING!! SInce the quality of the weighting is really high, I’d guess it saves 5-6 hours of manually rigging/weighting characters myself.

This is pretty awesome. I threw in a character I’ve been working on and it turned out great. There were a few places I could touch up on my end but all and all it was really good. This is a total time saver and in the future if I need some rigging done I might just have to use this.

When I first heard about them attempting to do this, I figured it was a lost cause. I was completely wrong. Completely! I teach at an art university and have used many different methods to speed up the rigging process with my students. Nothing competes with the speed and efficiency of Mixamo’s auto-rigger right now. And I am able to more quickly get my students moving on to the next topic, and they are all impressed as well. I find it interesting those who argue the price point. I think it’s certainly an amazing price to pay for the work that is done, especially in only a couple minutes. Nice job Mixamo! I look forward to more from you. :)

Really cool videos. I’ve been trying to learn Modo so it’s cool to see how easy this workflow is. Also the zBrush one is neat, I like that you can export multiple sub-tools to the auto-rigger and it works.

I was skeptical when it was in the testing phase(I had some minor involvement during this period) but I have to say the final product is very impressive. The skinning is clean and the setup interface is simple. Great job!

The pricing is just wow, sarcastically wow. You guys need a plan for us poor self financed guys, where you get so many rigs with a membership. For me its back to what I know, Character Studio. Don’t get me wrong, its genius and impressive, in a few clicks I have what takes me 30 minutes to an hour to achieve in max, but darn the pricing guys… and that’s just my opinion, I’m sure you guys are making huge bank! Genius, genius! I’m surprised there isn’t a good stand alone product that is as easy to use, and gets just as good results as this web based one.